


Picture Perfect

by sxetia



Category: Persona 1, Persona 2, Persona 3
Genre: AU, Angst, Bonding over trauma, Character Study, Gen, Other, Trauma, What-If, character-driven, headcanon heavy, how you ask? because i'm self indulgent that's how, innocent sin considered canon, inter-series crossover, platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 19:34:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20822666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxetia/pseuds/sxetia
Summary: Midway through his wayward existence during his first school year at Gekkoukan High, Minato Arisato receives a guiding hand from Gekkoukan's new photography teacher.





	Picture Perfect

**Author's Note:**

> totally self-indulgent little thing based off a thing i came up with while roleplaying yukino on tumblr a while back. couldn't pass on the chance to make my two favorite persona characters interact; i think they have some great mutual points and methods of interaction.

_Thursday, June 18, 2009._

At some point during the last ten-to-fifteen minutes, Gekkoukan’s school bells had rung to signify the end of the day — not that Minato had _heard_ it, his ears protected as always by the omnipresent headphones he dared not leave home without. Home — even if Minato _had_ heard the bell, it wasn’t like he would have found himself in any markable rush to return to Iwatodai Dorm. Not that he wished to embellish the circumstances of his lonesome existence with any begrudging fatalistic acceptance, but in a word there was _nothing_ for him within the confines of his dorm room, nothing to return to in the company of those he shared his housing with. _Housing,_ not _home._ Minato hadn’t called anywhere _home_ since he was six years old. His fellow students and roommates had lives of their own they were involved in; they had hopes, passions, _dreams_ for the future. Without SEES and the treacherous strife of the Dark Hour lingering over every single night, Minato had nothing: beyond their shared goal in investigating Tartarus and their awkward nightly pleasantries, the youths had nothing in common nor any unifying thread. They were his _coworkers,_ not his _friends._

The song filling his ears came to an end, before the next track could kick in and occupy his senses a hoarse voice beat it to the punch: “Hey, you all right?”

He’d spent the entirety of his after-school time thus far that day in a rhythmic trance, head against glass with steel grey eyes blankly fixated on the outside world and those who inhabited it. Some of his classmates had lingered for a moment after the bells to speak to the new teacher — a few of them to size up and haze a new instructor on her first year, a few of them new to the class requesting help, a few of them to innocently introduced themselves. Others huddled in their small groups, discussing their plans for the day and arranging to meet elsewhere, or sheepishly turning down offers in favor of extracurricular work, or plans to drown themselves in homework, or part-time jobs. Minato, in contrast, had simply slipped his headphones over his ears and sat there lifelessly. 

That had evidently piqued the interest of his teacher, which he discerned moments after he traced the voice to her stature peering over his desk. He regarded her appearance for a few moments: taller than average (a bit taller than himself, even) with a stocky stature and casual, haphazard posture. Her lax demeanor matched itself in her understated manner of dress; a form-fitting black shirt with sleeves rolled up and blue jeans to match. She wore a mop of long, curly black hair tied into a loose ponytail, thrown lazily over one shoulder to accentuate her strong facial features, which wore a friendly if not inquisitive expression.

Truthfully, Minato had not paid Miss Mayuzumi’s teaching enough attention to determine that she was the sort who would attempt to coerce him into conversation. If he had, he would have likely vacated herself of her classroom as soon as class had been dismissed.

Disregarding all conventions of social norms, Minato countered her query with a blank _stare_, expressionlessly and silently choosing to offer her the absolute bare minimum of acknowledgement. His music player started up with the next song, and milliseconds later Mayuzumi took the initiative to carry the conversation herself. Her words were drowned out by the pulsating beats that Minato so often drowned _himself_ in, but they were too late to save him: the conversation had already begun, and Minato had been pulled into the arbitrary grasp of social interaction. Reluctantly he brought his chest to the cylindrical player ‘round his neck and pressed his thumb against the “pause” button. The warm, comforting embrace of his music was gone, and he found himself alone with a stranger — he said nothing, leading Mayuzumi to assume a puzzled expression and tilt her head to the side. “I, uh — I said you’ve been sitting there a while. Don’t you have a train to catch, or plans, or… something like that?”

Minato punctuated her statement with a long, awkward silence. His teacher almost spoke up to once again pull the weight of the conversation behind her, but before she had the chance he opted to reply:

“I don’t particularly want to go home.”

Her face grew more puzzled, and even more concerned. “What, really? Something bothering you there?”

“No, not exactly.”

“What is it, then? Not many kids are exactly _dying_ to spend as much time at school as possible, especially not these days.”

The boy glanced off just to the side, fixating on the vacant space between himself and the desk in front of him. He contemplated not answering, but something within him compelled him.

“There isn’t really anything awaiting me there that I have any vested interest in.”

“What, you don’t have friends?”

“Not really.”

“What about your family?”

“My parents are both dead.” Years ago the topic would have brought Minato to tears, but those emotions had been sealed away and compartmentalized into their own neat holding space, never to be seen again ‘til they burned him apart from the inside. In an instant Mayuzumi let a heavy-set wince cross her face, sucking in a breath through her teeth as she cursed her own clumsiness. “Jeez, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.”

Mayuzumi thought for a second to try and extend some semblance of relation. What about her distance from her own parents, or how badly it tore her apart when she lost Fujii…? He was kind of like a father figure to her, wasn’t he? She shook the thought off and instead chose to stubbornly trudge through the conversation, bullheaded as she’d always been. The kid _needed_ somebody, even if he couldn’t bring himself to fess up to it. She planted a calloused hand on her own hip and racked her brain for an _in._ “What about photography?” she asked, fulfilling her role as a teacher and bringing the “conversation” back to the topic of school. “You joined this class, signed up for the clubs and all that, for a reason, right…? C’mon, I worked as a photographer for close to fifteen years, there’s hardly gonna be anybody better to get some pointers from than me. There’s some shots I’ve actually been _dying_ to get around Port Island, but I haven’t had the time since I moved here...” A smug grin, self-confident as ever.

In spite of her efforts, Minato shut it down quickly as he would anything else. “I don’t really care about photography.” Perhaps he wasn’t aware of how offensive the admission would be to his teacher, or perhaps he _knew_ and simply couldn’t bring himself to care. Mayuzumi’s facial expression grew sour and twisted, though not out of offense — she remembered her own disaffection with her classes when she was his age. She was simply _perplexed._

“Why’d you sign up for the club and come to the classes, then?”

“I needed an extracurricular credit for my junior year qualifications.”

_He cares about school, at least._ “And you couldn’t have picked the music club? You look like you’re really into music.”

“I can’t play an instrument.”

_Figures, no parents, no way to pay for lessons,_ she thought. “What about art?”

“My hands are too shaky for that sort of thing, so I don’t believe I’d go very far with art. I have quite weak constitution.” _Figures,_ she thought again as she sized up the boy’s meager frame. That troubled look took over her features again, lost in her own thoughts as she struggled to simply figure Minato out. “So… you mean to imply you don’t really care about _anything_ and intend to just… coast through every day?” He considered her question for a moment and tilted his head down, contemplating the last decade of his existence as he slowly descended further and further down the spiral. Minato brought a hand to his chin as he mulled it over, then dropped it into his lap as he looked up at Mayuzumi again. “I suppose that’s the case. I don’t really see a lot of reason to reach out or involve myself in things.” The teacher didn’t even wait a _second_ before firing back, blunt as could be: “Why not?” Nosy, forceful, unnecessary, sure — but Yukino Mayuzumi would be _damned_ before she didn’t go out of her way to help a wayward youth in need.

Tactless as the query may have been, Minato didn’t have much more of a grasp on social graces and paid it no mind. He turned his head to look back out the window and sank back into his seat, slouching backwards over the back of the desk. “There’s only one guarantee from growing attached to people, or things, and that’s that _eventually_ they will go away. No matter how good you may believe it to be at first, it won’t ever be worth its own weight when measured in comparison to the…” A pause, to search for his words and struggle to articulate his thoughts. He wasn’t used to this; it showed in the textbook-precise formality with which he spoke. “..._disappointment_ whenever you lose it.” His wording was clumsy, but he figured it best to understate his emotions rather than bare them to his teacher. Earnestness implied emotional intimacy, and emotional intimacy _inevitably_ led to bonds. He feared that, no matter how much he craved the notion of being _seen_ for who he was.

For once in the conversation, Mayuzumi paused to take in Minato’s thoughts and digest them. She’d inverted his own tactic back onto him, filling in the gaps in conversation with long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, she sighed and brought a hand to her forehead, swiping loose curls of thick hair out from her eyes. 

“I know how it feels.” 

The affirmation caught Minato off-guard, and as he looked at her again Mayuzumi bore witness to a rarity: the blank expression on his face shifted, even if ever-so subtly. His eyelids tightened just so, the edges of his lips pulled themselves taut, and his jaw trembled for a moment. Minato couldn’t ever recall somebody _empathizing_ with him — the tragedies he’d been made to encumber were always met with platitudes and empty sympathy (Miss Toriumi’s raw shock upon learning of his parents’ gruesome death came to mind), but he had yet to have been met with somebody who _understood._ Obviously, he was skeptical at first, which manifest in how he failed to reply and once again returned to simply _looking_ at Mayuzumi blankly. Taking that as a cue to once again carry their exchange, she continued: “I obviously only just met you, but… what you’ve said reminds me a _lot_ of someone I used to know.” Her memories briefly flickered back to Anna, how she wore that same disaffected look and chose to sit and fester rather than live her life. “...and how she felt reminded me of how I felt whenever I was your age. You remind me of her, and myself, is what I’m getting at — how old are you, sixteen?” He nodded blankly, and Yukino continued. “Yeah, your age then.” Another sigh, another wayward youth whom had been mistreated by the world. 

“I remember what it was like. My parents were really poor and never really got along, so I spent a lot of time out of the house. We _still_ aren’t really close, but... well, whatever, it’s not important. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, not at home and _especially_ not at school. School was the worst for me; I didn’t really have any friends and everybody who knew what I was just treated me like a weirdo. I was poor, I was too tall, I had stupid hair. I liked photography, _manzai_ stand-up, and playing darts; not exactly anybody else’s interests of choice so making friends was pretty difficult for me. It felt like anything I had didn’t matter, like it was just gonna go away whenever people got tired of being friends with the _weird girl._” 

“How did you cope with all of it?” Minato responded quickly for once, as if enthralled with her story — or more accurately, guilty of desperately desiring an answer to his issues. That emotionless, disaffected front crumbled just as quickly as Mayuzumi’s tough-girl disposition. She laughed sadly and turned her head to look out the window just as Minato once had, reminiscing with beads of painful nostalgia. “For a while, I _didn’t._ Not in any healthy way, anyways — I decided I really wanted people to like me, but I wasn’t smart enough to fit in with the… well, the _nerds,_” she laughed as if to lend some levity to the heaviness of her monologue. “Wasn’t pretty enough to fit in with the popular girls or be wanted by the popular guys. So, uh… combine all of that with me just being _angry_ enough at the world around me to want to tear it apart, and I ended up falling in with the delinquent crowd. Started smoking, shaved my head, committed vandalism, all of that. It was… pretty bad.”

Minato slumped forward in his chair and rest his elbows on his table, breaking his fixative focus upon Mayuzumi to regain his composure and re-affirm his stoic look. Her answer wasn’t exactly what he had hoped for — but one could easily surmise similarities between their chosen manners of handling their own despondency. Whereas his teacher had opted to self destruct all at once and burn out brightly, Minato chose to slowly fade out and smolder away. “It sounds as if the worry of it all got to you too.” Mayuzumi nodded her head firmly. “Yeah. And you know what? I lost all my yankī friends, eventually. They found out something about me they didn’t approve of, beat the shit out of me and kicked me out onto the street.” 

Pause. “...oh, I just cursed, didn’t I? Whatever, you won’t tell, will you?” Mayuzumi cracked a toothy grin Minato’s way, who just stared blankly at her. “I’m taking that as a ‘no.’ Anyways — yeah, I lost my friends there, too. Every one of ‘em, except for one. But having just that one friend felt a whole lot better than having _nobody,_ even if I was scared to death that she’d leave me too. But that’s kind of the thing about it all you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have joy without that loss, and to feel loss you have to have felt that joy beforehand. It’s not sad, it’s not awful, it’s just… it just _is,_ you know? Even when you’re at your lowest, there’ll be people around who care about you and want to help you pull you out of whatever you’re dealing with. That’s exactly what happened to me, even when I was totally convinced I’d never reach out to anybody ever again after losing my gang. Even the friends I made after that — we don’t talk as much anymore, if at all. Sure, it’s a loss and I miss them, but it’s not sad or awful or anything. It’s just life, people grow apart, y’know?” A solemn sigh. "Even people who I grew close to, like my photography mentor who eventually passed away... it hurt whenever he died, but I didn't ever find myself wishing that I never knew him. He made me who I am, and I'm actually kinda _proud_ of who I've become. It hurt a lot to lose him, but it would be even worse to have never known him at all."

Still unconvinced, and it was written all over his features — or more accurately it _wasn’t,_ Minato’s emotionless gaze fixated upon his teacher once more and unreadable as ever. He spoke up, indicating that her speech wasn’t _entirely_ a lost cause: “How did you make it stop hurting? The loss of people you cared so much about.” That somber, solemn look again, though this time Mayuzumi wore a nostalgic smile. “It doesn’t stop hurting, really. Not ever. The thing is about opening up to other people is that you trust them to build you up and put you back together, and help you figure out who you are. That way whenever you _do_ lose someone or something, you’re strong enough to keep going in spite of how much it might hurt, and you use those good memories to soothe it a little bit. Sometimes you just need one person to help you get on your feet so you’re ready to open up to lots of people at once. Again, that’s how it was for me.”

The boy’s head tilted to the side, inquisitive.

“Who was it for you?”

“It was my teacher.” A self-assured grin, half-fueled by her smugness and half by her fond memories of Mrs. Saeko. Mayuzumi would have to give her a phone call after this was all said and done, she was sure her old teacher would get a _thrill_ out of the knowledge that she’d passed the torch onto Miss Mayuzumi on her very first day of teaching. She was making Mrs. Saeko proud, and that knowledge warmed her heart. “You see what I’m getting at, here?”

For what felt like hours Minato simply sat there, mulling over what all his teacher had said and struggling to relate it to his own self. In an instant his eyes lit up with a certain _liveliness_ they’d been lacking since he’d first walked into the classroom, letting the epiphany enfold him. “I believe I do,” he finally admitted, and nodded his head curtly. “It makes sense. I suppose I’ve just never thought of it like that, because I’ve never really had the chance to… talk to anybody about it.” Mayuzumi laughed and shook her head. “Well, here’s your chance. Come on — I’ve been _dying_ to get some shots of the shrine near Naganaki ever since I moved here. I could use some help setting up my tripod and hauling the equipment — you coming with? I can show you the basics of photography, since you _clearly_ weren’t paying attention in class today.” Mayuzumi released a raspy chuckle, in good humor as always despite her tease.

Minato mulled it over for a moment, and then stood up. “Yes,” he stated as he picked up his school bag and threw the strap over his shoulder, pulling his headphones off his ears and dropping them so they draped over his chest. “I believe I am.”

Chills ran down his spine, and the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stood straight on end. A mysterious voice rang in his head…

_Thou art I… and I am thou…  
Thou shalt have our blessing when thou choosest to create a Persona of the Empress Arcana…_


End file.
